If you
have a survey map of your house or property issued by the Goa
Land Survey Department on tracing paper, hold it like a prized
possession!

Not because the
Land Survey Dept. no longer issues maps on tracing paper, or
because the old copy will acquire antique value for your
grandchildren, but because … hold your breath … chances are that
the current, computer-printed *Digitized* version will be at
variance with the original. If the old one was bad, the new one
is infinitely worse!

The mess that the
Land Survey Dept. now finds itself in, over the exercise of
digitizing its records, is like a chapter straight out of
Ripley’s Believe it or not. Beginning this Sunday, let
us examine some issues pertaining to Land Survey and Record of
(land) Rights, which have caused avoidable nuisance to Goans.

It was proper
that the State decided to computerize survey maps. Bulky paper
records would be reduced to few and better manageable Compact
Discs, and certified copies of maps would be issued at the
stroke of a few computer keys (instead of weeks as before, when
records were manually copied on tracing paper.)

But the manner in
which the laudable digitizing decision is being implemented, has
given rise to a chaotic situation where two certified copies –
one copied manually, the other digitized – of the same property
and issued by the same authority, are different from each
other! Before delving into this latest chapter of Goa’s Land
Survey saga, let us briefly peep into the past.

The
post-Liberation exercise of physically surveying the land mass
of Goa was jinxed with imperfections from word go. Immediately
after enactment of the Agricultural Tenancy Act, land
survey was introduced in 1965 under Legislative Diploma No.764
(cart before horse, actually, but that’s another story.) In
tune with the ruling MGP’s merger agenda, land survey rules were
a copy of the Bombay Land Revenue Rules, but without the
amendments carried out by Maharashtra. (Much like the
Agricultural Tenancy law, also borrowed from Maharashtra, and
without Maharashtra’s amendments that provided landowners the
Right of Resumption, twice. Goa had none.)

The basis of the
new Goa survey was inaccurate, outdated and erroneous coordinate
data, compiled by the colonial regime around 1925. Geographical
coordinates of Aguada (the Point Zero origin for Goa
coordinates), then found to be wrong, were partly corrected in
1930.

When the Aguada
Triangulation system itself was imperfect, any wonder that
several triangulation stations (like Chandel, Mopa plateau in
Pernem) in the new survey have errors as large as 16 metres
difference in the coordinates? The entire grid was thrown out
of scale.

How were these
errors hidden in the new survey maps? A smart Departmental
brain produced the solution : “compensate” the errors on public
nullahs and rivers. So if you want to build a culvert or bridge
across a nullah or river, which the survey map shows a span of
20 metres, be prepared for an actual ground measurement of
either four or 36 metres!

There was a clear
case for discarding the Portuguese-era triangulation and
adopting a new and accurate system. This was not done.
Instead, data collected through an army of field surveyors,
largely on inaccurate Plane Table sheets, was superimposed on
the erroneous old grid.

The result was
chaos, as the survey got completed by 1977. Leaving in its wake
the first wave of avoidable litigation!

So inaccurate was
the survey that lines running from one taluka would not match
with those in the adjacent taluka! Reason why the Land Survey
Dept. fought shy of issuing a single Map of a property that
spanned two or more talukas. If you owned, say, a contiguous
property that started at a corner of Salcete and went beyond
into Quepem taluka, there was no way of getting an official Map
of your property on a single sheet of paper … two separate maps
would be issued, one for each parcel in each taluka.

Another ingenious
leaf was borrowed from Maharashtra to hide errors. While some
villages and talukas were mapped in a scale of 1:1000 (where 1
centimetre on paper represents ten metres on ground),
neighbouring villages or talukas were put on different scales,
like 1:2000 or 1:4000. Defects defaced!

All this, of
course, happened in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, when the aam
Goenkar was less vigilant, public awareness almost nil.

If the
post-Liberation physical survey was bad, digitizing its maps is
worse (as we shall see next Sunday.) And happens, quite
ironically, when people are far more vigilant about defending
their interest in their landed property …